


Decay, Except

by Jenwryn



Category: Death Note
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-04-23
Updated: 2009-04-23
Packaged: 2017-10-02 08:17:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenwryn/pseuds/Jenwryn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mello spends his time pacing, and hating the silence.</p><p>Set while he's healing from his burns. Written in second person, via Mel's POV.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Decay, Except

**Author's Note:**

> So I was innocently walking my dog this evening, minding my own business, and listening to Regina Spektor, when this story jumped out and attacked me. Huh? Well, I'm not complaining; it felt damn fine to be writing these boys again, after such a long time! ♥

_Pumping someone else's blood  
And walking arm in arm  
You hope it don't get harmed  
But even if it does  
You'll just do it all again _

~ Regina Spektor, 'On the Radio'.

*  
You can hear every single sound in the apartment. Every single, bloody, insignificant, fucking little sound. The floorboards moan and creak when you walk on them. The sofa has been screwed to hell and back, and it whines wheezily when you sit down. You've tried opening the window, to let in some outside air, but all that brings is traffic, and the twitchy chorus of over-compensating, mouse-sized birds carrying on at the top of their sodding lungs. So you shut that shit up but, in the relative silence, the indoor sounds are even worse. Really. The refrigerator keeps humming and not-humming, caught up in an apparently irregular cycle. Hell, the leaking shower alone, with its _drop-shh-drop_, would surely be reasonable grounds for suicide.

You pace, and you poke at things. There are only two rooms, and you know them by heart already. The slightly musty scent of the sheets, mostly laced with sweat and smoke but also, now, a touch of smeared nutella. The shape of the water-stain on the bathroom ceiling, growing and warping like something out of a bad horror film you saw when you were a kid. The fact that there's a washing machine in the kitchen, stopping the cupboard-with-the-coffee from every being fully opened, but it's broken, and seems to have been for years, if the dates on the newspapers, shoved inside, are anything to go by. There's cereal in ice-cream containers, and baked beans in margarine tins, and the sole bottle of milk is smelling vaguely bad. The only new thing to be found, in the entire place, is the games' console, and the computer, both shiny and bright and loved, in amongst the busted, useless shit; they're also the only things you don't prod at.

You hate it here. It had been better when you'd been bedridden, and fuck if you hadn't thought that _that_ was bad, at the time. It's the silence. It's the noises in the silence, just to spite you, laughing and sneering at the edge of your ears. It's the urge you keep getting, to kneel down on that piece-of-crap rug before the sofa, take your rosary in your hands, and just pray, pray, pray, fucking pray for God to hear you, and save you, and make you clean, and make you whole, and take you away from yourself because you are your own sin and you make your own damnation. And you hate that. You hate that, and you hate your inclination to stare out the window at the blue sky, and the mothers scolding their brats, and the young men in their stupid suits talking into three gadgets all at once - you hate the lot of them.

But not as much as you hate yourself.

And the silence, the silence, it gets to you, until you want to break things, until you want to tear things, until you want to make trouble bleed from every surface in sight. Until you just want to scream, and scream, and destroy. Everything. Everyone. Every moment. Every breath. Every killer. Every Kira. Every ounce of your scarred, ugly, wounded body. And you would, you would, you really, really would, except-

Except. Somewhere. Deep down. In a place you can't even name. You know. You know that that door will open. You know that he'll return, with a bag of groceries in one hand, and his keys in the other. He'll have a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, and those fucking stupid goggles perched on his head. And he'll pretend not to notice that there's a world of despair plastered across your face, and he'll pretend not to see the way that you've been clenching and hating and pacing and losing grip. He'll just drop his keys, and drop his shopping, and walk you backwards, with a steady hand upon your shoulder, until your spine is pressed up against that godawful wallpaper. And then he'll look at you, long and hard and quiet, and you won't hear the silence any more, and you won't hear the noises, you'll just hear him, and his breathing, and his heartbeat, as you put your hand on his chest and count its movements. He'll lean in, after that, and he'll kiss you, or he'll bite your ear, or he'll bite your ear and _then _he'll kiss you. And you'll laugh, and you'll mock, and you'll call him a girl.

And he'll know better.

Which is why, today, your pacing somehow leads you to the old man in the apartment to the left, to borrow a spanner - or to beg for one, really, seeing as he thinks you're a hooligan, and obviously he's right - and you fix the shower.

Because so long as that door will open, and Matt will walk through it; so long as he needs you, so long as that is so, then destruction can be put on hold.


End file.
